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what can be a Vehicle Wrap design time?
Hallo.
Does it take anybody else here *DAYS* to prepare vehicle wrap files? We shoot for a final output size of 100% (of course) at 90DPI. That means that when I’m building them, I’m working on a document that’s often along the lines of 12 feet wide by 7 feet tall. (mostly we do em in Photoshop, but Illustrator is just as slow at that scale) So, basically, when I want to nudge something an inch or two, it takes literally 30 seconds or so for the image to redraw and allow me to move on to the next step. Adding a blur? That’s a good minute or two. Pasting graphics from one side to the other? Might as well go out for lunch, because that status bar ain’t moving for a while.
The machine I’m working on isn’t bad.. (near-new quad-core, 4G RAM, /3G switch, XP Pro, CS2, etc) and I know I could work on stuff at half size and double it at the RIP.. but we’ve tried that method and our RIP apparently sucks at enlargements, they turned out horrible (Onyx Production House).
For the actual pre-approval *design* stage, I can work small.. but at some point it’s going to have to be blown up to full-size for printing, and it has just amazed me at how long it takes to make the art for just a single side of a vehicle. Am I being totally stupid and missing a step? Or should I just plan on growing old watching those stupid status bars?
🙁
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11 Replies
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Coming from the computer industry, there is nothing wrong with that machine, in fact it’s got a very fast processor, memory etc.
That kind of size of image takes a lot of memory, and when physical memory runs out, it hits the harddisks.
That’s what you need to sort out.
How many harddisks are in the machine, what size are they and do you know whether they are SATA or IDE?
Hopefully you have a single harddisk, so we can look at getting another matching one and putting them in a RAID which will add a good deal to the overall speed of your computer.
(Idea is that 2 drives read simultaneously, reading and writing. This offers theoretically double speed, but in the real world 40-60% increase).
Before I add pages of whys and hows, just in case I’m preaching to the converted, please answer the above queries.
Regards
Ivan.
Just for reference, my monster is only 3Ghz and 2Gb RAM, but runs 6 x 72Gb SCSI 15,000 rpm drives together for the main drive system, which crushes any disk based task I throw at it and slaughters any other PC I have ever used. It has multiple additonal IDE, USB and SATA drives for a total of 3Tb (3000Gb lesser speed storage).
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Yeah, I’ve considered the RAID thing, but to do that I think I’d either need to get another machine (a very hard sell to the boss, just got this one 🙁 ) or rebuild what we have.. and unfortunately, we pretty much forced get everything from Dell, which aren’t the most user-friendly machines when it comes to tweaking hardware.
If I could build my own, it would have exactly your setup.. a couple 15k drives in RAID with a +1 for backup & data. Yum.
As it it now, I have 2 HDs.. the main C drive, where all the applications & OS reside.. it’s 150G, and I do my best to keep 50G free at all times. Then I use the other one (D drive) for my primary scratch disk and file backup. It’s 700G, with roughly 115G free at the moment. C drive is set as my secondary scratch disk. I believe they’re SATA.
I hit a couple Photoshop optimization tutorials and set everything up as best I could… history states, cache levels, etc. Unfortunately, these huge files are still bumming me out.
If this is the normal way of things, I can deal with it, it just seems to take so unbelievably long to get anything done… and I hear you guys saying "oh, we did 86 full wraps this week, including a yacht!" (yes, hyperbole, but still..) I’m just wondering how you guys work so fast, with how long it’s taking me just to set up this single one. 🙁
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For vehicle wraps we normally go as low as 70 dpi (although it looks not much different, it saves a lot of memory).
What i do to save time in designing (got to say i use CS3 already). I draw the most of the art first in illustrator and paste them later on to PS as smart object to add effects etc. This means i can scale the whole thing later on because the smart object is vector based. Now with CS3 i can even let the advanced layer styles act as smart filters, so they can scale too. (I hope you can still follow what I mean).
I have been used to those smart objects, layer-masks etc since they have been in PS (also known as nondestructive editing), it has the advantage that you can alter things later on very easily. Although most think that this method takes a lot more time, if you get used to it, it will actually save time at the end. If you keep this in mind from the start, even things like scaling the image at the end to a much(!) larger version has no real bad side-effects.
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I would have expected a Quad core with 4G RAM to be better with those size files to be honest.
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quote jonm01:I would have expected a Quad core with 4G RAM to be better with those size files to be honest.me too…i dont see what the problem is………….spec is far above what average folk run…… 😕
nik
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It’s the hard disks. You need a SATA II Raid 0 setup.
Even with 4gb only 3gb is being utilized under windows XP. 3gb isn’t enough to store all that data in memory when your rendering. Yes a fast processor is important but like said above when writing to virtual memory your bottle neck will be your hard drives. So no point having a super fast cpu at the expense of your hard disk setup.
You can run SCSI drives as mentioned but the increase costs with it as compared to the speed increase over the SATA Raid 0 don’t really justify it in normal businesses. A Raid 0 setup will generally increase the through put by a fair margin. If you need data redundancy run a Raid 0+1 setup.
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I wasn’t advocating SCSI (yet) as this is a much more expensive route.
I suspect, but cannot verify without knowing what exactly the machine is modelwise, or systemboard wise, that it already has the capability onboard for using SATA RAID.
For the sake of £100, I would look at taking out the 150Gb drive and putting a matched set of 300Gb+ 16Mb buffer, 7200rpm SATA II drives in a RAID 0 configuration.
Translation into English:
For about £50 each you buy two 300Gb harddisks, ones that have a bigger memory buffer of 16Mb (if the salesman doesn’t know, you’re in the wrong shop) and at that 16Mb buffer spec, they will be 99.9% chance that they are the better 7200rpm spin speed which means the get to your data faster.
Most modern drives are called SATA II which means they have a faster controller which is nice in your super modern PC, as this will have it too.
90% of modern motherboards inside the computer support RAID 0 or RAID 1.
RAID 1 is where the two drives would mirror each other , the idea being that if one dies, the data is safe on the other one.
You will have them set up as RAID 0, which is where the computer writes some bits of the files to one disk and some to the other at the same time, greatly decreasing write times. When reading back the computer reads from both drives at the same time. You don’t get double speed, but it can be near that.
The good point of RAID 0 is that it is likely supported in you PC already so apart from initial configuration, which will probably involve a wipe and reinstall of Windows, it is very cheap and gives a decent speed increase.
The downside is that if either drive fails, rather than just one, you lose everything stored on both drives. That is why you should have a backup made of the drive onto an external USB drive or tape. Basically, however you back up at the moment, you do the same, even though there are now two linked HDDs instead of one.
For £100 plus labour and some time out, you should have much faster system.
Regards
Ivan.
P.S. There is no need at your level or requirements to go for a SCSI system or let the salespeople talk you into a dedicated SATA RAID card, as you do not need this, your machines on-board RAID will be sufficient.
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quote jonm01:I would have expected a Quad core with 4G RAM to be better with those size files to be honest.
Me too, hence my confusion & sadness. heh
There’s some good advice in here, thanks! I think setting up a RAID array is probably my best bet, but I’ll have to do a little homework on what my internals are like… I’m sure the motherboard in there can handle it, I’ll just need to make sure. I also got clearance to start building at 70 DPI.. I knocked down the current project to that resolution and I’m pretty happy at how much losing that 20 DPI helped, with very little noticable difference at that scale.
Mostly I asked because I have a boss that gets all aggro if he ever sees me looking at a status bar. He thinks all we do is snap our fingers and the designs are ready to go, even though I’ve told him that isn’t the case a couple dozen times now. 🙁
Thanks again for all the help! 😀
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Ivan: Just wanted to ask what drive(s) you recommend? I read that 2 platter drives are faster then the 3 platter but not sure how you tell the differences.
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Obviously this is a signmakers forum not a computer forum, so I’ll make this brief.
More platters means more noise and more heat. These days there is little performance gain, the difference between most 7200rpm harddisks is single digit percentages, so I really would not bother with number of platters or spending huge amounts of time trying to work out the "best" drive.
Any modern, SATA II, 7200rpm harddisk is going to be much faster than a cheaper, earlier generation drive.
My recommendation would be the 750Gb Western Digital WD7500 Caviar SE 16 at £108 plus VAT and shipping.
If this is too much money, as we are talking about buying two for RAID 0 use, then the 320Gb version is £38.99 or 400Gb version £44.99, again plus VAT and delivery.
All these have a 3 year factory warranty, the 750Gb is also available at £149.99 plus VAT and delivery with a 5 year warranty.
All high capacity and modern drives should have a cooling fan blowing over them to help longevity. If your case does not have a dedicated harddisk fan, a standard £5 70mm or 80mm case fan can be tied in place with twist ties or similar.
In the case of this thread, capacity is not as much an issue as speed.
If I was to take off my computer spod head and put on a signwriters head, then I’d buy 2 x 400Gb for use in the machine, as there is only a few quid difference.
This give you 800Mb at warp speed main drive access.
I would then get your old 150Gb removed and flog it on ebay, then get the 700Gb reinstalled as a data drive, for keeping old and finished projects on. I would also buy an external 500Gb (60+VAT) or maybe two, for archiving data on for projects that you want to keep, in case your main machine blew up, the 700Gb failed, or the unit was stolen in a break-in. (Assuming you kept the external drive at home!)
Regards
Ivan
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Cheers mate.
I will go with the smaller versions as I don’t need huge amounts of storage space. I will do this for our RIP machine also.
We have an NAS to archive our files to at the moment once they are designed.
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